The Making of Zombie Wars Read online

  An hour later he attempted to open the bathroom door but it was locked. He tried again, baffled by the resistance. For a moment, it seemed he was inside one of his dream traps, but then he heard gasps and yelps and thought it was Ana crying. He removed his hand from the knob, because he didn’t want to deal with her tears. Ana, however, came out of the bedroom wearing his blue button-up linen shirt. Where did she find it? It was a summer shirt, displaced deep in the back of his closet.

  “I was cold,” Ana said, holding her elbow like John Wayne.

  “It’s okay,” Joshua said. Her short hair was all messed up and stood up in spikes. For the first time he noticed its stubborn thickness, rhyming with the fat dark lines of her eyebrows. “I think your daughter is in the bathroom.”

  “She will have been there whole day,” Ana said.

  Joshua knocked on the door, just to make sure Alma knew they were outside, that her mother could now hear her crying. How exactly have I ended up here, he thought, outside a bathroom of tears? Alma came out, wearing only a skimpy top and panties, her puppy breasts protruding. He could smell her: she reeked of morning adolescence, of glands and hormones, of nascent adult loneliness. She skipped by him, flashing a smile that he would have thought effortless had he not heard her sobs. Maybe she wasn’t crying but moaning with pleasure. He discarded the thought as obscene and double-locked the door behind him.

  He peed facing the foxhunt painting. There was a bird perched in the crown of one of the trees, watching with indifference the fox’s struggle. Joshua had never seen the bird before, even if scanning the picture had been part of his pissing ritual since he’d been in this apartment. What kind of bird was it anyway? A nightingale? He had no idea what nightingales looked like. Because they live at night, obviously—no one ever sees birds at night. The bird was brownish and hard to see, small and separate from the busyness of the hunt. Why would the painter hide a nightingale in the painting? There were worlds of living creatures Joshua would never see, still trusting blindly that they actually existed. He heard Ana and Alma argue in Bosnian outside. Maybe it wasn’t a nightingale. Maybe it was a buzzard waiting for the fox to go down. He had seen a buzzard, in Arizona, once: an ugly, filthy, bald bird. Maybe this was a British buzzard: restrained, classy, bland, like the queen or the dead what’s-her-name’s prince husband. Script Idea #163: The princess leaves Whatever Palace for some night fun—say, to meet her youngish lover—but then she finds him dead. Muslim terrorists tortured him to get the info that would allow them to get to her. Now they’re after her. Meanwhile, a ruthless tabloid reporter follows the scent of the royal rat. The princess’s only help: a handsome London cabbie, whose name is Will. Title: Will of the People.

  Joshua shook off his willy and studied his face in the mirror. There was a subcutaneous pimple developing in the corner where his nostril met his face—highly unsqueezable. Yet he bent his nose and pressed his sharpest nail against the minuscule protuberance. Willy and the princess fall in temporary love. But once she’s back in the palace, there is no way Willy could replace the jug-eared, dull prince. Miraculously, the pimple popped. Willy now knows far too much—he has seen her sitting on the toilet, which few mortals ever have. MI5+2, a supersecret agency, dispatches assassins after him. His only hope: the princess herself. The sequel title: Triumph of the Willy.

  Fuck me, Joshua thought. This is all hopeless. I’ll die an amateur, a dandruff survivor.

  * * *

  Ana made Bosnian coffee in a sauce pot. It was thick and strong; she took it black, while Joshua had to add milk and a lot of sugar to make it palatable. They drank it by the window, above which the silent chimes hung in a tangle. She rolled up her sleeves, quietly, looking out at the wasteland of back alleys and garage roofs. So much of Chicago consisted of what nobody cared to look at.

  “I lose my dreams,” Ana eventually said.

  “Your dreams?”

  “When I wake up I forget my dreams. Lot of things happen then I can’t remember,” she said. “Like I live then lose life.”

  “Me too,” Joshua said. “Except I lose them before they even happen.”

  He was assembling a sentence to explain his perpetual struggle with his inconclusive dreams, when Alma came out of the bedroom, ready for the day. Her hair combed and ponytailed, she appeared bright and happy. She kissed Ana on the forehead, then surprised Joshua by doing the same to him. It was possible that she was humming some song as she left, closing the door softly behind her. Where might she be going so early on a Saturday morning?

  “Is she happy?” Joshua asked. “What could she possibly be happy about?”

  “She is living,” Ana said. “She is happy.”

  “I’m living and I’m not happy.”

  “She has future.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “No. But I am not misery.”

  “Miserable.”

  “I am not miserable.”

  Alma ran back in, returning to the bedroom to fetch something. On her way out, she was putting a headband on, scuttling along. The confidence of her movements, the nimbleness of her body, the random smile she shot at them without saying a word. What’s wrong with teenagers? Joshua wondered. Indestructible, they come into and out of hell as they see fit. The little patients have so much of themselves and they know more is always coming, so they can afford to keep wasting it. One day, sooner or later, they run out of themselves and enter punitive adulthood. Once you mature, you start spending your limited life, every day one fewer to live.

  “You ever read Anna Karenina?” Ana asked.

  “Never finished it,” Joshua said. “Too drawn out for me. I could never remember all those names.”

  “You must read it. It is beautiful. It is about real life.”

  “Right, real life. I have no interest in that at this time. Real life kind of makes me sick.”

  “What do you write?”

  “In my screenplays?” The plural was both misleading and humiliating. “All kinds of stuff.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh I don’t know … What I’m writing now is called Zombie Wars.”

  “What is it about?”

  “About zombies. And wars.”

  He felt embarrassed talking about it. She would know wars. She would know what was really real and legitimate. She would know death.

  “It’s just, you know, commercial stuff. Except nobody’s buying it. Weird stuff.”

  “It is probably good,” she said, and seemed to believe it.

  “My father has prostate cancer,” Joshua said without thinking. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He regretted saying it as soon as it came out: now a response was required; now empathy was necessary. But he didn’t want response or empathy; he wanted Bernie’s prostate cancer not to be. He wanted not to think about it. He stirred his coffee, then focused on the beige whirlpool in his cup.

  “Most men get prostate cancer. Most live,” Ana said. “Best cancer.”

  “There is no good cancer. All cancer fucks up your body and your mind.”

  She stroked his cheek.

  “Many men survive from prostate cancer.”

  He was tempted to escape her touch, to show he didn’t need anything, but her hand was warm and soft, comforting.

  “You know what is good thing about you?” she asked.

  “Do please tell me one good thing.”

  “You are good.”

  “There’s a cultural gap right there. One thing I am not is good. I am selfish salmonella.”

  “Your face gets red.”

  “I blush? I don’t think so.”

  “For Tolstoy, people are good and they blush.”

  Ana grabbed Joshua’s hand and pressed his palm against her cheek, as if to make him touch her blushness, or, maybe, to show she was not afraid of salmonella contamination. It was warm, her cheek, its texture familiar to him by now.

  “You make me blush,” she said.

  He pulled his hand out of her g
rasp. The coffee in his mug was still revolving, if slowly, around some imaginary center. There must’ve been the first person who put milk in coffee. Who was the first person to stir it?

  “I find you very attractive, Ana, and sweet,” he said, “but this is not the kind of arrangement we could sustain for a long time. It’s kind of wrong.”

  “What does it mean: sustain?”

  “Maintain. Keep going. Whatever. I’m no longer your teacher.”

  Ana put her own hand on her cheek, as if to remember what Joshua’s touch felt like.

  “There is no place where I can go.”

  “I know. But we cannot live like this.”

  “We have to live. Like this or like something else.”

  “Let’s think about something else, then.”

  She sat with her legs crossed, Joshua’s shirt barely covering her ass. He could see the soft gossamer shimmering on her thighs; he could perceive the beauty of her body as expressed in that particular detail, as he could perceive her evanescent dimples and the imperfect moles scattered along her neck and the fact that, if her morning-alert nipples were her eyes, she would be slightly cross-eyed. He could perceive that it was those imperfections that somehow made her more authentic, more real within the space he shared with her. From this distance, Kimmy looked like a commercial for a girlfriend, bereft of imperfections—now that he was gone, she was definitely a completed person, every bit of the scaffolding finally removed. Ana applied her lips to the brim of her cup and he watched as the coffee in small sips flowed into her mouth. He wanted to kiss her, but a kiss at that moment would’ve confirmed an unspoken agreement he was unwilling to sign, promising a future. He took a sip of his coffee, its bitterness completely vanquished by milk and sugar. She moved her tongue behind her lips, as though to spread the taste all over her gums, the dimples dancing all over her cheeks. Was there a Bosnian way of drinking coffee, whereby they rub it into their gums like heroin? How would she drink her wine? She’d probably look even more beautiful.

  “Why?” he suddenly asked.

  “What: why?”

  “Why did we do it? Why did you sleep with me?”

  Ana drank more coffee and chortled, looking at Joshua.

  “I like you,” she said. “I wanted.”

  “Come on, Ana. You risked—and lost—everything because you like me?”

  She took another sip of coffee, rubbed it into her gums with her tongue.

  “What can I lose that I didn’t lose before?” she said. “I lost my youth in the war. I lost my life. I lost my job because I came to America. I lost my husband.”

  “You have your daughter.”

  “My daughter,” Ana said. “She is super old for her life. She was three when her real father was killed in the war. She didn’t go out for walk until she was six. She couldn’t play on street, because snipers like to kill children.”

  She was mad now, her eyes tearing up.

  “Last week she watched on television how somebody killed some dogs with poison gas. It was on television, just like that, and she watched it. She could not sleep. She could not eat.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because dogs didn’t do nothing to nobody. How can you ask why?”

  Her anger was beautiful: her eyes gleamed in the morning light, greener than ever, and she licked her lips between thoughts. Her tongue never stopped moving.

  “You think I have something now? I find Esko in the war, and I lose him in the war too. Good man, but he comes from the front and hates me because I don’t understand what is happening on the front. He hates me because I am woman. He hates me because I am doctor and I see people die every day in hospital, so I don’t cry over him. He doesn’t know how to play with Alma, how to talk with her. He is not her father. She sees him crazy every day. He screams and breaks things. He can’t wait to go back to the front. He wants to die. Always I have to say: one day, after the war, everything will be good. I tell him, I tell Alma, I tell myself: one day will be good.”

  She stopped to pour more coffee in Joshua’s cup, making it darker. She topped off hers too and took a sip.

  “You know when I decide to come to America? One day, I was driving. I see truck coming to me. I don’t want to stop. I don’t care. Who cares? If truck cares, he will stop. He stop, in the last moment. It was like I wake up. I was very scared. I decide: I must go from here or I die. I don’t want to die.”

  A tear rolled past her lips, and Joshua couldn’t bear to watch it reach her chin. He added sugar and milk and stirred his coffee well beyond what was necessary. The dread of life: that there is always far more to people than what the commercials claim. Nobody really lived all that happiness you could see on television, in magazines, everywhere around you. Who was the first person to declare happiness? They should’ve shot the bastard, right then and there. Or just let him slowly succumb to the evil cells.

  “Good day is today. And today they poison dogs who did nothing to nobody. Where is good? Where is me? Me?” Ana implored him. She touched his forearm, and a current went through his body. He’d had no idea that such things could be inside women.

  “You ever seen dead person?” Ana asked.

  “No,” Joshua said, but it was not true, strictly speaking.

  “Like day with no light. Like ball with no air. They just empty.”

  Joshua had cracked his head and, when Bernie had taken him to the ER for stitching, he’d seen the bloated purple feet of a corpse on its way to the morgue, where, perhaps, it would’ve been deflated. He, and everybody, always imagined zombies as bloated and heavy with rotten flesh. But what if they were empty, like sacs, like camp inmates, the only remnant of life their insatiable hunger? That would allow for some empathy with them, an urge to save them, rather than just blow them up.

  “I am not old. I love life. Maybe too hard, but I love it,” Ana continued her monologue. “I have soul. I have passion. I don’t want to be victim. I am strong.”

  “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being,” Joshua said.

  “What is that mean?” Ana said. “I am not thing.”

  “That’s Spinoza.”

  “What’s Spinoza?”

  “Spinoza, the philosopher.”

  “I don’t like philosophy,” Ana said. “I don’t like talking about nothing.”

  Her body had a smell that made Joshua want to lick her skin like ice cream. He returned to stirring his coffee.

  “You are like that truck,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  “Okay, but why would you want me? You deserve better than me, better than a fucking truck. I’m not handsome. I have dandruff. And look at this place”—he pointed in the general direction of everything around them—“this is a garage for failure. There is nothing here you’d want to want. If you risk everything, you should risk it for a better man, flattering as it all is to me.”

  “I want to take what I want,” Ana said and stroked his cheek. “Every man think he must be best. Man think people love you when you attack. But when you attack you don’t believe that people like you at all. Because you don’t like when other people attack. You lie to make people like you, and when they like you you don’t trust them because you lie.”

  “I don’t attack,” Joshua said. “I do lie, though, if not very well.”

  “You think that man is job. In the morning you go to work to be man. You think that job is everything. But it is nothing. It is just job.”

  “What job? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ana shook her head, forgiving of his thickness.

  “You are not strong.”

  “Thank you!” Joshua said. “Finally! Thank you for your honesty!”

  He instantly realized, of course, that he would’ve preferred if she’d thought him strong. She grabbed both of his hands and held them in hers, as if about to propose. Baruch was wrong about one thing: desire that arises from sadness is much stronger, other things equal, than that which
arises from joy. It could be, in fact, that desire arises only from sadness, the daily devastation of constant dying. Ana was much larger than him, or anything he would ever be. On his way through the desert, he was passing through her as through a memory of a verdant forest.

  “You are better,” Ana said. “You are sad. You blush. You are warm.”

  “Warm? It’s probably stress.”

  She put his hands on her hips and drew closer to him to press her coffee-flavored lips upon his.

  He felt like a guest in his own bed, which made it more comfortable. This time, he wasn’t cheating on Kimmy, technically, so Ana’s body felt different. For one thing, there was more of it: she was dripping wet and he licked her cross-eyed nipples in concentric circles, until the shape of her breasts led him toward her armpits and then he went down her sides and across to her belly button and she was spreading her legs as his tongue inched down toward her picture-perfect clitoris. Deflated she was not. His cheeks were smeared with her wetness, so much of it that he had to swallow it, and his tongue was burning with it. He thrust his tongue inside her, as she lifted and twisted her hips, and slid it up to her clit and back, and put two fingers inside her, and she came, hitting his back with her heels, reciting something in Bosnian, speaking in rhymes and tongues.

  Then he slid up her body and his cock was inside her, and he was kissing her, the same whetted tongue now inside her mouth. Far in the back of whatever was left of his mind, the light of reason was struggling against being finally extinguished and he was aware that wearing a condom would’ve been a good idea, but there was no way that he was getting out of her, because she took him in and he was with her in every move, in every gasp, kiss, and lick—she let him in so deep he didn’t have to think about her, and therefore he didn’t have to think about himself, but of course he was thinking about not thinking about himself and he was about to start thinking about himself when she bit his cheek, as if eager to spread the pain, and it hurt and he loved it and he could feel the skin was broken and he started coming and so did she.